It might be very different from what we have on Earth, but is there anything specific to Venus current environment that makes us believe it is not possible, with the exception it would be very, very, different from what we have on Earth ?
I find the Venus images more interesting than Mars. Even more surprising, 30 years ago the Russians were flying balloons for days on Venus atmosphere !
"Soviet Balloon Probes May Have Seen Rain on Venus"
https://www.wired.com/2013/04/vega-venus-rain/
"The two 3.5-m-diameter balloons floated for nearly two days in the Venusian atmosphere around 55 km above the surface. Unlike the hostile terrain below, the cloud layers at this height are a veritable wonderland. Temperature and pressure are comparable to Earth’s average and there is ample sunlight streaming in from above. If not for the sulfuric acid clouds and hurricane-force winds, the atmosphere of Venus would be a comfortable living space."
"Every Picture From Venus' Surface, Ever"
https://www.planetary.org/articles/every-picture-from-venus-...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terraforming_of_Venus#Cooling_...
Some languages, like (European) French, put spaces before question marks[0] and exclamation marks[1] and people might be so used to doing it that they even do it when writing in a different language.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Question_mark#Stylistic_varian...
"Toujours un espace avant et après: le point-virgule, le point d'interrogation, le point d'exclamation et les deux points."
https://grammaire.reverso.net/les-espaces-et-la-ponctuation/
But for French Canadian variations the indication is just a "smaller" space.
I'm not sure what that gains us over just having a habitat in orbit though.
Colonizing other planets doesn't make much sense to begin with yet. We don't even colonize Antarctica, and it's a paradise compared to mars.
I'm more interested in setting up industry and habitats in earth orbit. Close enough for low latency internet, and trips measured in hours, but far enough to allow asteroid mining, 24/7 solar, manufacturing and refueling largely outside of earth's gravity well. Plus if something goes wrong you can have escape pods that return to earth. Having a strong space industry like that is also the best protection from potential asteroid impacts.
The unique characteristic of a colony on Mars, Venus or another planet would be that it is not on planet Earth. Antarctica on the other hand has to compete with all the places on Earth that are a lot nicer.
There are abundant resources in free space, from hydrogen gas to metals, carbon, oxygen that can be mined from passing asteroids (you could easily live in those asteroids while mining them) ... Energy is plentiful, the more complained about problem really is that energy is far too plentiful.
Maybe you'd want a base on the moon, but free-floating in space would work even better.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Altitude_Venus_Operationa...
Critically, it gains us raw materials. Space is empty. The upper atmosphere of Venus is full of elements we can use to sustain life.
That doesn't seem like a great resource. If you value CO2 so highly there is plenty right here on earth that nobody wants and people will actually pay you to remove from the atmosphere. No need to go all the way to Venus.
Even on the surface of Venus, inhospitality notwithstanding, the resources are at the bottom of a gravity well equal to earth's. It is way more viable to mine asteroids than mine a planet, especially a planet like Venus.
Mining other planets is only interesting if the market for the resource is on that same planet, or we've exhausted the supply of asteroids with that resource.
NASA heard your July 4th plea, and sees you Discovery Mission 15 (VERITAS) and 16 (DAVINCI+). Targeted to launch in 2028 and 2029/30 respectively.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discovery_Program
There's a distinction there worth pointing out. We can actually land on Mars, and if something goes wrong there are options (Apollo 13 style). If something goes wrong on Venus, you're falling through acid clouds and getting cooked. The vacuum of space is less perilous than the atmosphere of Venus.
On the other hand, as you mentioned, Venus has the raw materials and the magnetosphere for terraforming. Might be worth just dropping some hardy lichen on Venus to get the process started, because no one is going to go there as-is.
Hardy is an understatement. Life would need an entirely different chemistry to function at 730K.
I know close to nothing about extremophiles, but I imagine that there is something, somewhere on earth, that's used to living in an environment that is closer to Venus's environment.
(On Venus at 50 miles up, the atmospheric pressure is approximately the same as Earth, whereas on the surface it's the equivalent pressure of Earth's Mariana trench.)
The surface pressure on Venus is around 90 atm which is equivalent to the pressure one km below the ocean surface. The Mariana trench is a little over 11 km deep.
"Recent data from ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter showed that on a six-month journey to the Red Planet an astronaut could be exposed to at least 60% of the total radiation dose limit recommended for their entire career."[0]
Maybe for robots, but I think human colonization of Mars without first mastering the Moon is very unlikely.
[0] https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex...
Oxygen combined with other atoms is not rare. From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Composition_of_Mars
> Based on these data sources, scientists think that the most abundant chemical elements in the Martian crust are silicon, oxygen, iron, magnesium, aluminum, calcium, and potassium.
The problem is separating the Oxygen from the other materials to get Oxygen molecules that you can breath, and that requires a lot of energy.
Last year some team made a project to produce Oxygen molecules in Mars using the soil and energy, with some method similar to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aluminium#Hall%E2%80%93H%C3%A9... (Here the process use Carbon rods as cathodes, that get "burned", but IIRC their idea was to avoid the Carbon rods and collect the Oxygen molecules.) I'm not sure if this early prototype is viable, anyway.
Also, extracting the Oxygen molecules from CO2 requires also a lot of energy. Plants need a lot of sunlight to do that and the artificial methods also need a lot of energy.
First, whether lichen can survive in full sun with a watering robot to tend it, doesn't really tell us anything about whether humans can survive on Mars. (Lichen is also growing inside the Chernobyl reactor.)
Second, hopefully we haven't contaminated Mars with Earth life yet. If we have, it would make it much harder to find Martian life buried somewhere, or trace evidence of previous life on Mars in the deep past. It's official policy, and has been since the start of the space era, of all the space agencies (which they follow with varying degrees of actual commitment in practice, I assume) to avoid contamination of any planet with Earth life. Until we can conclusively rule out life or past history of life on a particular world, we should probably keep to this policy.
The first habitats will probably not use any martian resources. First uses will probably be as construction materials. Then possibly as a fuel source. Those are the high-mass uses. Things like growing food/oxygen don't require much mass and so are far down the list.
You're going to be really happy about this then.
We're going back to Venus!
NASA just chose VERITAS and DAVINCI+ as a one-two-punch combo for Venus.
Just in case you aren't familiar with the missions,
One is a descent probe + communications relay (DAVINCI+) that is supposed to last 63 minutes from the top of the atmosphere to the bottom, and bring modern spectroscopy + imaging to bear on the atmosphere. They particularly want to investigate trace gas elements and the presence of organic compounds in the atmosphere. As it descends, the probe will also be taking high resolution snap shots of the tessera with a modern-ish (emphasis on the ish) camera right up until it is destroyed.
The other one is an orbiter with the goal of making the highest resolution map of Venus possible. And acting as the basis for future missions. They'd also like to monitor the atmosphere to characterize any variations such as the surface emitting water (could there be underground water on Venus? Probably not, but who knows?)
Based on overheard watercooler chatter, it appears that one of the concerns that drove NASA to give both Discovery slots to Venus missions is because of the potential loss of institutional knowledge. The people who helped build and run Magellan are retiring, and we haven't sent anything there since. It's important to capture their information and train the next generation on Venus so that we don't lose hard earned lessons.
IMO, Venus is a really important planet to study because it helped us to understand global warming and planetary dynamics. A better understanding of Venus means refinements to our atmospheric models for climate change.
It's more important than Mars, potential for life or not.
What I personally want to see in my lifetime is a return to Neptune and Uranus. I don’t believe we’ve been to either since Voyager. Given such a mission takes the right planetary alignment, a decade of prep and still a decade to get there this will take awhile.
The Venus missions actually make either icy giant missions less likely, sadly. Outer planet missions are super expensive and the next launch window is in the early 2030s so time is actually running out.
They're both about ~$500M, and are intended as foundational missions for more intensive exploration.
> The Venus missions actually make either icy giant missions less likely, sadly
So one thing that's good about the new administration is that they've indicated interest in expanding funding for planetary science + exploration. Especially with international partners.
This interest is likely to be a hedge against China.
> Outer planet missions are super expensive and the next launch window is in the early 2030s so time is actually running out.
There is some good news here; JUICE, Europa Clipper and another mission that's slipping my mind. The Europa mission in particular is a prestige mission and has been actively lobbied for a while. So it's going to be interesting how that turns out.
On the whole, not sure how deeply you follow the politics of this, it all depends on what the focus of the next decadal is, https://www.nationalacademies.org/our-work/planetary-science...
I'm hoping that Neptune is on the list.
> a return to Neptune
I've got a whole rant on Neptune. Mostly because I think its temperature anomaly might be one of the most significant scientific questions of our time.
This has always been my sentiment as well. Mars is a dead planet with no magnetic belts for shielding, and is just too far on the edge of the goldilocks zone. Also, if we can figure out how to terraform Venus' atmosphere, then maybe we can "fix" Earth's.
It's worth noting that Venus is still probably a better terraforming target than Mars [1]. This romantic notion of Mars has rooted itself deeply at this point (eg with Elon Musk) but Mars is basically a more distant and inconvenient Moon. Almost no atmosphere (in fact, just enough because dust storms will occasionally just coat all your equipment), the Sun is weaker and gravity is still very low.
Venus's atmosphere is about 3% nitrogen and 97% CO2. It has about 100x the atmosphere of Earth, which means there's actually more atmospheric nitrogen than on Earth. And abundant CO2 means oxygen is abundant.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BI-old7YI4I